Wilderness Tips

Kristin Calabrese‘s odd large-scale paintings of depopulated room interiors combine an unsettling, slightly creepy dose of the pathetic fallacy -- landscape-as-reflection-of-human-emotions -- with a feverish formal compression, as if she were trying to fit too much into the frame, causing everything to crumple slightly. Luck of the Draw is no exception, intensifying its almost Cubist distortion of space with its depiction of actually collapsing physical space -- what appears to be a cheap single apartment with a caved-in kitchen roof, torn wallpaper and assorted debris. Similarly, the little talking-to-the-camera phrases that float on Calabrese’s surfaces -- little messages stuck on walls, or altered tuna-fish can labels, reading ”I‘m Not Over You“ or ”Why Are You So Crazy?“ -- are echoed in the refined domestic touches: a bowl of green apples on a table; a vase of tulips; a fresh loaf of bread; a drawerful of spices that suggest anything but dereliction, or even a squatter. While I could have done without the artist’s other piece -- a giant purple triangle with flowers in the middle -- Luck of the Draw reconfirms Calabrese‘s promise as one of the most interesting and idiosyncratic young painters in L.A.

Tamara Fites’ installation takes the pathetic fallacy to another dimension, creating obsessively detailed environments that act as three-dimensional multisensory narratives of subjective human psychologies, usually off the beaten track. I Love Pompeii, Fites‘ work in Louver’s open-air ”skyroom,“ is no exception, spinning an ambiguous story about an armchair archaeologist-entomologist whose isolation is tangible in the looped video of unintelligible signals from the outside, and in the pathetically cocooned figures -- reminiscent of the plaster casts of evaporated volcano victims from Pompeii -- that occupy the space. As usual, the bleak, frayed pathos of Fites‘ assemblage is transformed by the depth of attention paid to its composition. The baroque white-trash narrative filigrees that open on closer and closer inspection offer the patient observer a wealth of formal pleasures resting just beneath the surface.

One of the people Fites thanks for their help is her friend Mark Housley, whose own small solo show opened upstairs at Patricia Correia Gallery on July 18. Housley’s exhibit, titled ”The Chamber of the Trembling Unicorn,“ consists of a handful of rough-hewn oil paintings and a spindly rose-bush sculpture made of wax. These works take the landscape-as-metaphor to a mythological level, piecing together cryptic, surrealist elegies from images of flowers, beds and tombs. The urgency of their screw-studded surfaces and Day-Glo color schemes doesn‘t compromise the haunting stillness of the imagery. Housley’s earlier paintings were more cluttered, and more reliant on a particular set of accepted lowbrow visual strategies. By depopulating his paintings‘ dreamlike space and pursuing the unlikely de Chirico--on-E melancholia-a-go-go of his new work, Housley has found his voice in the wilderness.